Bridget Hilton-Barber strolls into the capital of cool for her cappuccino fix and goes straight to work
“We take the best out of both café and office and wrap it up in a cool urban space.” So says the menu at The IT Corner in Melville. And it sure does. This cool little corner café is already filled with hipsters and their laptops at 8am. As I sit down, the unusually cheerful waitress gives me a slip of paper with a Wi-Fi code on it, and before I know it I’m connected and slurping down a much-needed giant cappuccino. The IT Corner is fabulously hip. The décor highlights are the cool wallpaper and lamp shades, and the Melville crowd is a mixed and cosmopolitan bunch with interesting clothes (berets, leather jackets, African prints, funky T-shirts) and assorted hairstyles ranging from completely bald to Mohican and wildly grunge. Everyone here, and I mean everyone, has a laptop and appears to be actually working — and there’s not a whiff of the suburban ladies who lunch. The IT Corner offers its own house-brand coffee from Ethiopia, Indonesia and Colombia, and it serves its delights from a trendy silver coffee station that also has cakes, fruit and other breakfast offerings. It is a seriously cool urban space for mobile workers. There are a few bigger tables for meetings, and a lounge area, but it mostly has small tables (a bit too small) for single workers. The place also provides IT services like laptop rentals, virus removal, software installation and screen repairs, so in the awful event of something going wrong with your laptop while you’re there, life will not necessarily end. It may even improve.